has come down to us in the original form. There is a later complete
epic, however, also attributed to Cædmon, of the same scope and purport;
and it retains so much of the old heathen spirit that it may very
possibly represent a modernised version of the real Cædmon's poem, by a
reviser in the ninth century. At any rate, the latter work may be
treated here under the name of Cædmon, by which it is universally known.
It consists of a long Scriptural paraphrase, written in the alliterative
metre, short, sharp, and decisive, but not without a wild and passionate
beauty of its own. In tone it differs wonderfully little from _Beowulf_,
being most at home in the war of heaven and Satan, and in the titanic
descriptions of the devils and their deeds. The conduct of the poem is
singularly like that of _Paradise Lost_. Its wild and rapid stanzas show
how little Christianity had yet moulded the barbaric nature of the
newly-converted English. The epic is essentially a war-song; the Hebrew
element is far stronger than the Christian; hell takes the place of
Grendel's mere; and, to borrow Mr. Green's admirable phrase, "the verses
fall like sword-strokes in the thick of battle."

In all these works we get the genuine native English note, the wild song
of a pirate race, shaped in early minstrelsy for celebrating the deeds
of gods and warriors, and scarcely half-adapted afterward to the not
wholly alien tone of the oldest Hebrew Scriptures. But the Latin
schools, set up by the Italian monks, introduced into England a totally
new and highly-developed literature. The pagan Anglo-Saxons had not
advanced beyond the stage of ballads; they had no history, or other
prose literature of their own, except, perhaps, a few traditional
genealogical lists, mostly mythical, and adapted to an artificial
grouping by eights and forties. The Roman missionaries brought over the
Roman works, with their developed historical and philosophical style;
and the change induced in England by copying these originals was as